Ridley officers sue the township and their captain, saying he demoted them for revealing misconduct

Two veteran Ridley Township police officers have sued the township and their supervisor, saying he waged a yearslong campaign of intimidation and retaliation against them and demoted them this year to working patrol routes.

Gerard Scanlan and Sean Brydges had served for nearly a decade as members of the department’s Anti-Crime Unit, working with county investigators on drug and gun cases, according to the suit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Philadelphia. In late January, the two were reassigned to the township’s patrol unit, a position typically given to new officers.

In their suit, the two men said the reassignment was a demotion ordered out of spite by Capt. Scott Willoughby after they accused him of misconduct. They said Willoughby had asked them to replace money seized from drug dealers that had been removed from evidence; pressured them to drop charges against friends of his; denied them overtime; and threatened to compromise their undercover work by revealing their identities.

Willoughby did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Neither did the township’s solicitor, William T. Neill. Joseph Ryan, the township’s manager, said Wednesday evening that he hadn’t seen the lawsuit and was unable to comment on the allegations.

The attorney for Scanlan and Brydges, Andres Jalon, said Wednesday that the two men feared for their families’ safety because of threats made by Willoughby.

“It’s a shame that in this instance, we have two detectives who want to do nothing more than their jobs, and you have the person who’s supposed to run the department, manipulating them and threatening them the whole time,” Jalon said.

In 2014, the lawsuit said, after $8,000 went missing from evidence the officers had seized in a drug bust, the captain gave them cash to replace the money.

At the time, a secretary in the county District Attorney’s Office was being investigated for embezzling drug-forfeiture money, and the suit said Willoughby was worried that Ridley Township’s evidence room would be examined.

Shortly after the officers reported this to the township manager, they said Willoughby started treating them aggressively, despite promises that their report would be confidential.

Scanlan and Brydges said in the suit that Willoughby manipulated arrest data to make the two officers seem less productive and tried to discourage neighboring police departments from working with them.

They also said he tried to hinder their investigations, and in one case, in 2018, leaked the identity of their confidential informant to the suspect’s lawyer, a friend of his.

The captain’s retaliation against them, the officers said, diminished their reputations and resulted in lost income. They are seeking unspecified damages.